NSSE Survey Administration in Full Bloom!

Happy Spring! We are about halfway through the annual survey cycle of the NSSE 2007. While NSSE administration is wrapping up, we have included various updates on our most recent innovations: The official launch of the BCSSE 2007; the upcoming NSSE Users' Workshop in Wichita, KS; the electronic distribution of a NEW Cognitive Interview Guide; a case study on Youngstown State University's use of NSSE data and their involvement in the Pennsylvania State Parsing Project; findings from the BEAMS Project's Mid-Year Assessment meeting; FSSE research highlights; the recently live administration of the LSSSE 2007; upcoming NSSE conference presentations; recent media attention; and helpful website resources.

BCSSE 2007 Registration Now Open

After two years of extensive field-testing, The Beginning College Survey of Student Engagement (BCSSE, pronounced "bessie") has been officially launched. Registration is now open at: http://bcsse.iub.edu/

BCSSE measures entering first-year students' pre-college academic and co-curricular experiences; as well as their interest in and expectations for participating in various educationally purposeful activities during college. It is designed as a companion to the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Entering students take BCSSE prior to starting classes in the fall and then complete NSSE at the end of their first year. BCSSE results are reported for institutions on their own, as well as in a BCSSE-NSSE combined report which links data from both surveys. Linking BCSSE and NSSE data provides more detailed information about incoming first-year students' academic engagement patterns and how these engagement patterns relate to their reported behaviors near the end of their first year of college.

Linking BCSSE-NSSE Results

There are many ways to link data from BCSSE with NSSE. For instance, student-faculty interaction is an important factor contributing to the success of first-year students, but how do institutions practically assess the nature of student-faculty interactions occurring on their campus? One approach is to assess the ways in which incoming student expectations align or differ from their actual experiences with faculty. For example, the red bars in the graph below indicate students who reported experiencing low student-faculty interaction at NSSEville State University in the spring of 2006. Of these students 40% had indicated on BCSSE that they expected low engagement with faculty during the upcoming school year, thus their experience reflects what they had anticipated. In contrast, 19% of the students at NSSEville State who experienced low interactions with faculty had expected high levels of engagement with faculty during the upcoming school year. This type of result may prompt NSSEville State to investigate why almost 20% of their incoming first-year students who anticipated high levels of student-faculty interaction did not report high levels near the end of their first year.

By weaving together BCSEE and NSSE data, institutions will obtain deeper, more meaningful insights into the nature of the experiences of their first-year students.

NSSE Users Workshop

Time is Running Out to Register for the Spring Drive-in Regional NSSE Users Workshop at Wichita State!

April 16, 2007 is the deadline for workshop registration. If you'restill deciding whether you will attend the NSSE Users Workshop at Wichita State University on April 19-20, 2007, here are some highlights of the scheduled sessions:

Find out how, through oversampling, one institution has generated school-level benchmarks of effective engagement and how the disaggregated results led to a deeper understanding of school-specific benchmarks.

Learn more about the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE), and the new Beginning College Survey of Student Engagement (BCSSE).

Dr. George Kuh, the Director of NSSE and participant in the US Department of Education Higher Education Summit, will deliver the opening plenary discussing why engagement matters, what has been learned so far, and what activities are ongoing.

Dr. Gary Miller, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Research at Wichita State, will be the featured speaker at the breakfast plenary on Friday, April 20th. Dr. Miller is a member of the AASCU, NASULGC Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) Work Group on Learning Outcomes that is evaluating various accountability tools under consideration in the VSA.

The Drive-in Users Workshop, sponsored by Wichita State University, Friends University, and Newman University, is designed for faculty, staff, and administrators with commitments and responsibilities for enhancing the quality of the undergraduate learning experience.

Discover What Students Really Mean:Use NSSE's New Cognitive Interview Guide

If you want to know what your students really mean when they say they receive "prompt feedback from faculty," you might consider conducting some student interviews and focus groups. Cognitive interviewing and focus group techniques can be adapted to help institutions develop a deeper understanding of their NSSE data. To facilitate your examination of what the questions and results mean for students at your institution, NSSE has created a step-by-step guide to conducting cognitive interviews and focus groups.

The 26-page guide, A Guide to Contextualizing Your NSSE Data, has been adapted from methods and protocols used to examine the psychometric properties of the NSSE survey. It describes cognitive interview and focus group methodologies, the three stages of a cognitive interview, and provides suggestions for the coding of responses. Detailed instructions are included for planning, conducting, and gathering data from cognitive interviews and focus groups. In addition, the guide contains interviewer script templates, materials checklists, and sample forms that can be customized to each institution.

Featured School

Youngstown State University

Youngstown State University (YSU) has used NSSE to inform campus decisions about institutional improvements. YSU has previously administered NSSE in 2004 and 2006. This year, YSU sent an announcement message to its 4,000 students in an effort to increase student awareness and understanding about NSSE and its use on campus. The results from NSSE have been reviewed on an ongoing basis, with presentations and workshops hosted each semester since 2005. Based on ongoing discussions, the institution's Assessment Council recently recommended specific action steps to improve the documentation and integration of educationally enriching experiences for students. YSU evaluates NSSE results in relation to multiple sources of data. Comparison data include but are not limited to: focus group summaries, student demographic characteristics, student retention and graduate rates, student participation in campus programs, students' performance on state and national exams as well as additional survey data completed by faculty, staff, and students.

This year, YSU's participation in NSSE is part of a three-year investigation entitled Parsing the First Year of College. Details are available at http://www.ed.psu.edu/cshe/Parsing/home.html. Led by researchers at Pennsylvania State University, the purpose of the project is to understand the comprehensive influences affecting student learning and persistence during the first year. With funding from the Spencer Foundation, the principal investigators at Penn State selected thirty-five diverse institutions to participate in this extensive study of first-year students. In March 2007, YSU project staff conducted assessments of students' writing and critical thinking skills. Students involved in the Parsing Project may also voluntarily complete the NSSE survey by March 30. Data on student persistence will be collected in the near future. The project is timely because it will enable YSU to better understand the multiple factors contributing to student success. A source of pride for the campus is educating a relatively high number of first-generation college students. The Parsing Project and NSSE are just two of many endeavors that YSU undertakes to celebrate and extend student success.

BEAMS Project Updates

The Mid-Year Assessment meeting for the final cohort of institutions participating in the Building Engagement and Attainment for Minority Students (BEAMS) project was held in New Orleans on March 1-3, 2007. The BEAMS project, a partnership between NSSE and the Alliance for Equity in Higher Education and funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education, began in 2002 to encourage and support participation in NSSE by Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), and Tribal Colleges. BEAMS is designed to help participating institutions use NSSE results to improve retention, student engagement and institutional effectiveness by providing support mechanisms to participating institutions to enhance their capacity to utilize data in decision making.

It was exciting and invigorating to witness the progress that institutions have made in using their NSSE data. The Jarvis Christian College (TX) team led a workshop describing how Jarvis has improved its retention rates and has identified and made significant improvements in several key areas of concern on their campus. Norfolk State University (NSU), a member of the BEAMS project since its inception, has administered the NSSE survey on a continuous basis since 2002 and uses its results to promote student engagement campus-wide. NSU targeted three areas for improvement: the first-year experience, academic advising, and service learning and civic engagement. NSU's NSSE scores from 2003 when compared with 2006 showed marked improvement on "Enriching Educational Experiences" benchmarks as well as selected BEAMS project-related NSSE items such as "quality of academic advising."

The Mid-Year Assessment meeting provided an opportunity for participants to share how they have used their NSSE data and to gather new ideas from other BEAMS institutions.

FSSE Updates

Highlighting FSSE Research
Dissemination of research findings is an ongoing effort for members of the FSSE Staff. Most recently, we collaborated with two institutions to present national and institutional findings about faculty who teach General Education Courses (GECs) at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Specifically, the presenters discussed FSSE results showing that GECs are structured to emphasize essential learning outcomes and effective educational practices more than non-GECs. Results suggests that GECs placed greater emphasize on learning outcomes such as intellectual skills, individual and social responsibility, deep learning, diverse interactions, and active classroom practices, than non-GECs. Presenters also illustrated specific institutional efforts to improve the promotion of essential learning outcomes in general education and across the curriculum.

For more information on the results and other research projects like it, please visit our website at http://fsse.iub.edu/index.cfm. Also, if you would like to collaborate with a member of our FSSE Staff to present your FSSE findings, please email us at fsse@indiana.edu.

LSSSE Updates

On March 19th, LSSSE went live with the fourth national administration of the survey. Over the next few weeks, we will contact more than 53,000 law students at 82 law schools across the U.S. and Canada. This year the Law School Survey will be administered in both English and French. This is LSSSE's busiest spring yet, and we are looking forward to a very successful survey period. Also, stay tuned for more information about the first Users' Workshop. This workshop will help administrators and faculty members work with statistical software, and it will also offer them a chance to connect with other LSSSE schools. We hope to spark a dialogue about how the data can be used to improve the quality of law school programs across the country. To see a research design that combines the LSSSE data with other important measures (bar passage and employment statistics), visit the Web site at www.lssse.iub.edu.

Road Show

March - April 2007

Mar. 1 - 3

AAC&U General Education and Assessment

Miami, FL

Mar. 8

Utah System of Higher Education Retention and Persistence to Graduation Symposium

Utah (UT)

Mar. 18 - 19

University of Maine Board of Trustees Meeting

Farmington, ME

Mar. 31 - Apr. 4

2007 ACPA/NASPA Joint Meeting

Orlando, FL

Apr. 9 - 13

American Educational Research Association (AERA)

Chicago, IL

April 19-20

NSSE Drive-In User Workshop

Wichita, KS

NSSE in the News

ARTICLE

DATE

PUBLICATION

The Varsity Online
"If they build it, will we care?" University of Toronto uses NSSE results to create a student center

NPR
Martha O'Connell, Executive Director of 'Colleges that Change Lives', recommends NSSE in this NPR article, titled "How To Choose a College That's Right For You."

February 2007

Inside Higher Ed
The Spelling Commission's attempts to measure accountability are good in theory, but problematic in implementation

February 2007

NSSE Web Site Resources

The NSSE Web site is a comprehensive resource. This month's featured pages are:

Special analysis information

NSSE offers an instructive comparative analysis of every institution's data, but some schools need even deeper insight – either more comparisons with different groups of institutions or further analyses of their own data set. NSSE meets these needs by offering special analyses at nominal cost. The guidelines for ordering special analyses can be found at http://nsse.iub.edu/special_analysis/.

Publications and presentations

There is a growing body of research using NSSE data, and we try to keep abreast of it all on our Web site! Researchers can use this bibliography to inform their own writing or to bolster strategies to incorporate NSSE into the greater campus culture. Many articles are linked full-text from the reference list. http://nsse.iub.edu/html/pubs.cfm?viewwhat=Research%20Paper.

Information on other surveys

NSSE is the largest of our ongoing projects, but there are several companion surveys that may be useful for you: